Anthony M. Townsend - Smart Cities - Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia

Botanicalls, like many objects on the Internet of Tilings, is powered by an unsung but utterly ubiquitous kind of computer called a microcontroller. Microcontrollers are the brains of the modern mechanical world, governing the operations of everything from elevators to the remote control on your TV. Like a personal computer, they contain a processor, memory, and input/output systems. But unlike PCs, microcontrollers are small, simple, and cheap. They aren’t general-purpose machines that can run a word processor as easily as they play a game—they are optimized to perform just a few functions but do them well, over and over, without crashing. Sensors that measure light, sound, or—in the case of Botanicalls, moisture—trigger their maneuvers. Preloaded code on the microcontroller analyzes those measurements, determines an appropriate response, and then relays instructions to another add-on. A PC outputs to a screen or a printer. A microcontroller outputs to other devices that act on the physical world—motors, lights, and relays.

Faculty at the Interactive Telecommunications Program began to experiment with microcontrollers in the 1990s to create interactive artworks. In 1999, Daniel Rozin assembled a stunning mosaic “mirror” of 830 tiny wooden tiles, each manipulated by its own microcontroller. Paired up with a video camera focused on the viewer, the motors would deflect the tiles to create different shadings. The result was a constantly changing pixellated self-portrait reminiscent of the work of painter Chuck Close. But at the time, working with microcontrollers required navigating a steep learning curve. Microcontrollers were general-purpose industrial components, designed to be a starting point for electrical engineers to devise complex circuits, not a plaything for artists.

By 2004, two other ITP instructors, Dan O’Sullivan and Tom Igoe, had amassed enough experience tinkering and teaching with microcontrollers to write an introductory textbook for would-be hardware hackers, Physical Computing: Sensing and Controlling the Physical World with Computers. But the microcontrollers available to hobbyists and hackers, such as the PIC (Peripheral Interface Controller), were hardly plug-and-play. During a visit to his workshop in 2011, Igoe showed me one, a simple black microchip sporting metal wire legs used to wire it into a circuit board. Sitting on his lab bench, it looked like some kind of silicon insect. “Most microcontrollers are pretty barebones,” he laments. “You have to build up a good bit of circuit around them just to get them running. There’s no simple software interface for them and you always have a separate piece of hardware that actually flashes the code onto them.”33 What he needed was a cheap and simple microcontroller on which students could quickly load code from their laptops so they could focus on application design, not circuit design. The vast bulk of people interested in physical computing were hackers and artists, not engineers. As Phillip Torrone described it on the blog of Make magazine, a kind of latter-day Popular Science for hardware hackers, “it’s nice to pay your dues and impress others with your massive Art of Electronics book, but for everyone else out there, they just want an LED to blink for their Burning Man costume.”34

The solution to physical computing’s steep learning curve came from Italy’s own Silicon Valley, the town of Ivrea. Best known as the hometown of pioneering Italian computer maker Olivetti, in the early 2000s Ivrea was the site of a short-lived but highly influential design school, the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (IDII). Ivrea, like the Interactive Telecommunications Program, was a magnet for hardware tinkerers and attracted students who pioneered improvements on industrial microcon­trollers, such as Colombian artist Hernando Barragan, whose Wiring prototyping platform was a huge step forward for nonengineers who wanted to experiment with physical computing. For the first time, instead of custom-building circuits around a general-purpose industrial microchip, students could “sketch with hardware,” as Igoe put it, incrementally tinkering with sensors, lights, and other actuators. They could also quickly write, debug, and update control code to develop new interactive experiences.

Ivrea shut down in 2005 when new management at its benefactor Telecom Italia cut off funding, but instructors Massimo Banzi and David Cuartielles founded the Arduino project to carry the work forward. The name came directly from a nearby pub, but it was also a clever reference to Arduin of Ivrea, a local nobleman who reigned as king of Italy in the eleventh century.35 It was also a statement of their aspirations for its role in future physical computing projects, literally meaning “strong friend.” As it spun out, Arduino tapped a global community of contributors, including Igoe, who has been one of the project’s core contributors. Everything from the hardware on up is open source, allowing anyone to design and manufacture his own variants on the original design.

Today, you can go online to any of a dozen shops and buy an Arduino that fits in the palm of your hand and does away with much of the labor involved in making a working project with a microcontroller. You can plug it straight into your computer via a USB cable to load your program, and there are a variety of add-on boards, or “shields” (another reference to Arduin), and sensors that can let it see the world around it and connect to the Internet. With Arduino, it is still a few hours’ work for the average artist or designer to get that LED to blink. But unlike industrial microcontrollers, the learning curve isn’t a vertical brick wall with the instructions for the climbing gear written in an alien language. Once mastered, Arduino can power incredibly complex designs that combine computation and physical objects. “Want to have a Professor X Steampunk wheelchair that speaks and dispenses booze?” Make s Torrone asks. The answer: “Arduino. Want to make a robot that draws on the ground, or rides around in the snow? Arduino.” Arduino’s magic, he points out, is that it is simple “but not too simple.” Amateurs can rapidly prototype new ideas using bits of borrowed code and off-the-shelf components. “Its hot glue, not precision welding,” Torrone concludes.36

Like any new species of technology, Arduino’s real disruptive power lies in its ability to flourish in a new ecosystem. So far, growth doesn’t seem to be a problem. When I spoke with Igoe in October 2011, over three hundred thousand officially branded Arduino devices had been sold to date, a number projected to hit five hundred thousand by year’s end. We estimated that, including derivative designs and clones, as many as one million Arduinos wrould soon be “in the wild.” Around the world, arts and technology clubs host Arduino workshops to teach the kinds of skills you used to have to go to ITP or Ivrea to learn. RadioShack has even jumped on the bandwagon, and returned to its roots as a hobbyist’s supply store during the 2011 holiday season, putting Arduino starter kits and books on display for gift shoppers. Teachers around the world are using Arduino to teach physics and computer science—and blogging about their experiences. Torrone predicts, “Within the next 5 to 10 years, the Arduino will be used in every school to teach electronics and physical computing.”

For Igoe, the real potential for cheap, easy-to-use microcontrollers is networking them into clusters that cooperate to create newr computational environments. Lean design and mass production have driven the retail price of Arduino boards under $25. While adding a Wi-Fi shield will cost you another $50, prices continue to fall. As Igoe explained, when microcontrollers cost over $ 100, “you couldn’t teach people about computing, you could only teach them about a computer. They wrould still treat this thing, even though it was cheaper than their laptop, as one computer. Their whole idea, their wrhole project had to live inside one computer.” But as prices fall, more projects incorporate not just “networked objects,” as one of Igoe’s courses is called, but entire networks of objects. “I wanted [students] to think about computing as a medium. They didn’t have to be limited to one central processor. Every object or device could have its own brain, its own processor.”